Not that common but becoming increasingly popular in Estonia as well. I can get PON (passive optical network) connection 100/20 for 24€ (34$) or actually I should say I have it for over a year now. The project started about 1 and a half years ago.

This actually isn't only 1 provider but all 3 major providers offer similar solutions for similar prices (one goes for 120/10 and powerboost to 150 - eurodocsis)

Hoping to get faster speeds this autumn but not sure about it. The official routers only support 100MBit but the GPON ONT supports over 3,5GBps. Reply

I was paid to get my Master's degree here in the USA (Materials Engineering at UCLA to be exact). My tuition was paid and I made about $20K a year on top of that...that was back in the mid 1990's. This is common in engineering, though. (and somehow we have a shortage of engineers).Reply

Masters is different, it brings in prestige to the schools in form of research, they'll happily pay for it. Undergrads don't get the same kinda treatment, with the exception of a handful of overachievers in some cases.Reply

I thought the same. Only in America one can't praise their neighboor but instead have to minimize them to make them feel better of their shortcommings.

The question that Americans should be asking is "how much do others save by not paying for private health insurance vs extra taxes in a single payer?" It kills me that these fools can scream about others's higher taxes but so conveniently forget they are being bent over by insurance companies.

Remember, Americans pay over 2x what the next country spends on health care. It doesn't matter if it comes from taxes or the lovely check you send to your robber barons. Reply

It's not a fair comparison though, considering what else those taxes pay for.

To mention a few things a higher tax burden gets you...

* A minimum of 5 weeks paid vacation. Paid higher than your work weeks at that.* ~15-20 days worth of national holidays, also work-free and full paid.* Tax-funded unemployment benefits.* Tax funded retirement benefits.* Free education, including higher education. You only get 6 years worth of funding for university studies but you don't have to pay for admission or attendance, only literature.* State-funded healthcare, everything past 900 SEK a year in medical care and everything past 1800 SEK a year in medicine is free.

Basically the higher tax burden is very much true but it's not really applicable to the network infrastructure argument.

I believe the issue in the US is mostly due to the geographical monopolies, high price of admission and the inane need to build competing infrastructure for the same purpose.

To make a comparison to another much-maligned area - telephony. Every telecom carrier in Sweden use the same bands, both for 2G, 3G and presumably LTE as well as that network is slowly expanding.

That makes the market far more mobile, and by extension competitive.Reply

you guys in europe realize that Sweden is about the size of California and Finland is smaller than New Mexico, right? It seems like its a tad bit easier to cover those countries in fiber and make it affordable than blanketing the entire US.

Not to say that I'm not jealous of the speeds, but its easy to understand why its going to take awhile to have access to those speeds in every US market.Reply

Sorry to burst your bubble but LTE isn't actually 4G. LTE-Advanced is and that is still under developement. LTE is the closest they've come so far to achieving real 4G.

Unfortuanately most US carriers are used to lying to their customers and brand even HSPA+ and CDMA as 4G.

According to the standard, to be certified as 4G you need to have 1GBps for stationeri clients and 100Mbps for moving clients. Those are theoretical speeds of course.

The other thing about 4G is that it costs too much to spread to rural areas. The demand is too low for an investment of this size.**For the part that small countries are easier to cover - they're actually not. The technology and the investment is quite big for newer tech and clients aren't really keen on paying it. Bigger networks have more money to spend and test out new technologies. What's harder for them is to have enaugh stability in the system to support all of the load that clients can and probably will make.Reply

And what do you think does the back haul to those towers? You guessed it, it is fiber.

LTE and other wireless technologies is only for the last mile access. And it can't compete with fiber in terms of capacity. Not by a long shot, unless you give up the enormous spectrum allocated to radio/TV and the military. And even then there is a limit.Reply

While the point about most countries in europe being sized like individual US states, that doesn't address why even reasonably sized cities here have such terrible broadband. It isn't like I live in a po-dunk town (100k+ pop) but large parts of this community don't even have more than a single broadband option (bombcast). In theory ATT/SBC was doing uverse, but it seems that was only for the parts of town already serviced by their DSL and they're missing my neighborhood... despite it being built in the late 60s.

There is also a lot bigger market in US. US is a lot more densely lived (especially big cities) compared to Scandinavia so putting fiber in big cities shouldn't be a problem. Fiber is only available in big cities here in Finland (and mainly on new buildings), so it's not like we all have fiber. I'm still using 10Mb/s ADSL even though I live in Helsinki (the capital of Finland).

I think it's more about overall network scheme in US. From what I have heard, there is less competition (e.g. one ISP owns this are and the other owns that area) in the US, given that you still have those ridiculous data caps and hefty prices. When there is no competition, the ISP can do whatever they want and in this case, they have no need to install fiber as people will be staying as their customers anyway. No competition, no innovative services.

It is true that our governments have supported the fiber program though. Reply

I never understood the size argument. If it's so "easy" to get fast internet in a small country, wouldn't it also be easy to do it in one state? And by extension all or most states "individually"?Not to mention individual cities. Sweden and Finland combined have the same amount of people as Los Angeles.Reply

The US is about ~22 times larger than Sweden, talking about surface area, while enjoying ~33 times the population.

Any argument regarding population density is thus nonsensical, though I can understand why it's popular.

Fiber in Sweden isn't government subsidized per see, though a lot of the initial infrastructure that were built for SUNET (the Swedish University NETwork) were obviously done with government money since the universities are state-funded.

What's happening is that cities and individual companies owning/renting housing are building fiber into the apartments and leasing out the actual management to existing ISPs.

For example, the company who rents out my apartment provides 10 Mbit fiber as part of the basic package (along with water, garbage collection etc.) and I can choose between 7 different ISPs when it comes to upgrading the service. Currently enjoying 100 Mbit for 69 SEK a month (~11 USD).

It's a great system since it means ISPs don't have to lay down their own fiber out to each end-user but can focus on management and service.

Since the fiber is dug down and installed en masse it also keep the pricing down.Reply

It's actually different here in Finland. With ADSL, I can get the ISP of my choice because the lanes are not owned by any specific ISP. However, with fiber, the fiber is usually owned and installed by a specific ISP.

They do this because if I have ISP A atm and have no reason to change (ADSL prices are fairly similar), the ISP B can install fiber and thus get me as their customer (higher speed + cheaper bill = nobody will refuse). Reply

Size is less important than lack of initiative in our market and lack of line sharing requirements.

The US market is not much of a free market, there's no need to invest in infrastructure when no one can afford to enter your turf and compete, besides, who the heck wants ten phone/cable/electric/driveways lines to their home, line sharing is the wisest thing they did in Europe.

The slow but profitable progress on this side of the Atlantic is a good situation for the monopolies/duopolies but bad for the consumers.Reply

It's certainly not the size of a country but population density that should count at best. So if that is true, where are the 1 GBps offers in the big cities (NY, SF, Boston, Chicago, etc.)?

The difference is that in the US the ISPs are granted area monopolies or duopolies by the virtue of the right of way. if You don't believe me, go to your town hall and have a look at the contracts that the telco/cable companies have with your city government.

In many European states there have been government monopolies for telco and when those got dismantled in the 80s, they did own the wires and the rights of way. Now they have to sublease their cables and their facilities for decent (government controlled) prices. So the end consumer companies compete for your business on the same lines.

And the government subsidies are in the government payed for infrastructure of rights of way and facilities from the government monopoly days. Similar subsidies have been granted in the US too. At the very least the government used imiinent domain to get the right of way needed in some cases. Reply

Sonic.net today announced it has been selected to operate and support the trial fiber-to-the-home network Google is building at Stanford University. This experimental project will test new fiber construction and operation methods, while delivering full gigabit speeds to approximately 850 faculty and staff owned homes on campus.Reply

As the internet is slowly replacing free broadcast channels for news and entertainment.... This nation needs to move towards a free wifi network. There is no reason why people should not have access to this 'super information highway'. Premium service could still be provided by cable companies through strict regulations to prevent price gouging or service throttling.

Holy BATMAN!!!!!!! Hold on, let me do the math right quick. Yeah, 303.36 times faster than my current "broadband" internet. Let me be clear here. I live 40 minutes from Chicago. I have the FASTEST internet available to me. I pay for 6MPBS downloads. There has been "an unidentified issue on the line" for years at this point. So realistically I get 5.12 down .63 up. Ping is 53ms.

Seriously Google; I will gladly pay you 100/month for this internet. But so help me if you start putting bandwidth caps on it like everyone else... (shakes fist).

So bandwidth caps are, ostensibly, there to ensure good performance for all users. Keeping a small group of users from dominating the available bandwidth should leave plenty for everyone else. Cable companies use fiber as their backbone and use nodes to serve a group of houses, so the caps are really an effort to protect all users on a given node. If Google is really bringing fiber from the house to the street and the backbone is strong enough then they really shouldn't need to cap. If the backbone is weak, they still might not need to cap if everyone plays nice. I'm guessing they will build out the KC network properly and keep it cap-free.Reply

Why would google need to beta test something that's obviously going to be successful in the USA?

I look at it simply: if you can offer an internet service that is leagues above and beyond all of the cable, DSL, and fiber providers--at roughly the equivalent cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure, you will NOT fail.

I'm going to be so sore when I have to leave Japan (and not JUST for my internet service). Unless google decides to serve where I happen to end up!Reply

The beta in this case has nothing to do with market viability, yes, it will be successful; but will the equipment they're planning to use be enough to provide a flawless experience for the users of KC? I think it's brilliant to trial it in a techie area like Stanford. These are geeks like us, and given the opportunity to experience these speeds we would all do whatever we could to saturate our 150 Mbps allotment as much as possible as often as possible. So if their network could survive 400 of us living in one neighborhood, it can survive anything.Reply